Speciale Invest closes second fund at Rs 286 crore; to focus on DeepTech and SaaS

Speciale Invest, a seed-stage VC investing in deep science and enterprise technologies, announced its second fund's final closure today at Rs 286 Crore. The 2nd fund has been oversubscribed twice the amount announced during the fund’s launch, which was Rs 140 crore.

The fund, which has backed startups such as Agnikul, The ePlane Company, CynLr, Qnu Labs, GalaxEye Space, Wingman, StreamAlive, Airboxr, Trainn, Uravu Labs, among others, will look to invest in 20+ early-stage startups through pre-seed and seed rounds with the average cheque sizes ranging from US$ 100,000 to US$ 1 million.

In April 2021, the company had announced their second fund to be a corpus of around Rs 100 crore, but this got oversubscribed to over Rs 140 crore.

Speciale is focused on investing in start-ups building enterprise software products including SAAS, Developers tools and frontier technologies including Climate, Advanced Materials, Space Tech, Robotics, Photonics, Alternative Energy, to name a few in India well as some parts of Asia.

Speaking on the new development, Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest, said, “We are humbled to have the opportunity to play an active role in influencing the DeepTech entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. The belief our LPs have placed in us is indeed Speciale and allows us to function as long-term business partners to our founders. The oversubscribed closure of our second fund reaffirms the opportunity ahead for DeepTech in India and our commitment towards working with entrepreneurs to solve hard technology problems for the world from India!”

Speciale had raised its first fund in 2018 and invested in 18 cutting-edge startups so far, with an average deal size of sub US$ 0.5 million. Notably, this second fund has nearly grown 4x in capital commitments of its predecessor fund. The investment strategy and portfolio construct remain similar across funds.  A larger corpus allows for more follow-on allocation and the opportunity to double down on the winners within the portfolio.

“We are elated that our second fund has received such a tremendous response; this would not have been possible without the trust of our investors, employees and the entrepreneurs in us. This will enable us to continue this journey of investing in disruptive innovations that are deeply rooted in multiple streams of science, engineering, technology and sustainability. As we move forward, we take the learnings and progress from our previous and existing fund portfolio as motivation and will continue to partner with early-stage founders who have unique and deep insights into their vision and have products and tech that will make the world simpler and better," said Arjun Rao, General Partner at Speciale Invest.”